whisker

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The hair on a man's cheeks and chin.
• noun A single hair of a beard or mustache.
• noun One of the long stiff tactile bristles or hairs that grow near the mouth and elsewhere on the head of most mammals; a vibrissa.
• noun Informal A narrow margin; a hairsbreadth.
• noun Nautical One of two spars or booms projecting from the side of a bowsprit for spreading the jib or flying-jib guys.
• noun Chemistry An extremely fine filamentary crystal with extraordinary tensile strength and unusual electrical or surface properties.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun One who or that which whisks, or moves with a quick, sweeping motion.
• noun A switch or rod.
• noun A bunch of feathers for sweeping anything.
• noun In zoology:
• noun One of the long, stiff, bristly hairs which grow on the upper lip of the cat and many other animals; a vibrissa; a feeler; also, the set of such hairs on either side of the mouth. See vibrissa, and cuts under Platyrhynchus and tiger.
• noun plural Any similar formation of hairs, feathers, etc., about an animal's mouth; also, color-marks suggestive of whiskers, as mystacial or maxillary stripes. See whiskered.
• noun In entomology, a long fringe of hairs on the clypeus, overhanging the mouth, as in flies of the genus Asilus.
• noun The hair of the face, especially that on the sides of the face or cheeks of a man, as distinguished from that which grows on the upper lip (called the mustache) and that on the chin (called the beard), but the word was formerly also used for the hair on the upper lip: commonly in the plural. Compare side-whiskers.
• noun In ships, an outrigger of wood or iron extending laterally from each side of the bowsprit-cap, serving to support the jib and flying-jib guys.
• noun Something great or extraordinary; a whopper; a big lie.
• noun A blusterer.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun One who, or that which, whisks, or moves with a quick, sweeping motion.
• noun Formerly, the hair of the upper lip; a mustache; -- usually in the plural.
• noun That part of the beard which grows upon the sides of the face, or upon the chin, or upon both
• noun A hair of the beard.
• noun One of the long, projecting hairs growing at the sides of the mouth of a cat, or other animal.
• noun (Naut.) Iron rods extending on either side of the bowsprit, to spread, or guy out, the stays, etc.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun That part of the beard which grows upon the sides of the face, usually of the male, or upon the chin, or upon both.
• noun A hair of the beard.
• noun One of the long, projecting hairs growing at the sides of the mouth of a cat, or other animal.
• noun colloquial The (very small) distance between two things
• noun nautical spreaders from the bows to spread the bowsprit shrouds.
• noun statistics a graphic element that shows the maxima and minima in a box plot
• noun One who, or that which, whisks, or moves with a quick, sweeping motion.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a long stiff hair growing from the snout or brow of most mammals as e.g. a cat
• verb furnish with whiskers
• noun a very small distance or space